Douglas Ladore seeks damages for anyone who bought Killzone: Shadow Fall under ‘false pretenses.’
When Sony released Killzone: Shadow Fall some gamers were disappointed that its multiplayer mode output was, at best, variable, and certainly not the 1920×1080 standard they were expecting. Douglas Ladore has taken his disappointment to California’s District Court and filed a class action against Sony, seeking damages for those who bought the game under what he describes as “false pretenses.”
The suit seeks in excess of $5 million, to “restore to Class members any money acquired by means of false advertising (restitution)” as well as cover legal fees. In essence, Ladore’s looking to take every dime Sony made from Killzone: Shadow Fall as well as damages, preferably exemplary damages if it can be proven that Sony’s conduct as willful.
Sony’s position, as reiterated in a March blog post, is that both single and multiplayer output in 1080p, as promised. However multiplayer uses what Sony describes as “temporal projection,” utilizing multiple lower-resolution frames effectively stitched together to create the 1080p effect, achieving “subjectively similar” results. Many gamers, Ladore included, found the result unacceptably blurry.
“We recognize the community’s degree of investment on this matter, and that the conventional terminology used before may be too vague to effectively convey what’s going on under the hood,” said Sony in its blog post. “As such we will do our best to be more precise with our language in the future.”
The class action specifically references a March Eurogamer article on graphic performance, which did point out the Killzone issue, though at the time Eurogamer wasn’t sure what the cause was. The article goes on to warn that achieving an actual 1080p performance isn’t as straightforward as many gamers believe.
Anyone seeking the full text of the class action can find it here.
Source: Ars Technica
